There is some activity today but nothing big looks imminent. I think they have one more spiral to put up to finish the northwest corner. I can see that the cables for the two spirals already in place for the last arrowhead that still needs to be finished do not have their cables attached to back stays and tightened yet, and were left hanging all weekend. That is unusual.
About the first thing they did today was send people up to the northwest corner. I assume they are inspecting and once their inspection is done, I am hoping permission will be given to complete the northwest corner.
Hope to see them attach the cables for the two newest spirals in the northwest corner and get that last spiral up to complete the last arrowhead today. It can't be good that the missing spiral is not out in the open in front of Walt, getting ready to go up.
But I do see what looks like one of the long bendy steel pieces being brought out of storage, presumably to be used to fix the newly installed box girder to it's back stay. Maybe they have learned it is best to get the bendy, thick one in place first and then connect the more traditional cables to the back stays?
Looking at mockups of the completed project, I see now that I was wrong about needing only 3 more box girders to connect the northeast and northwest corners. There are only 3 columns between these sections that do not have spiral supports in place but the ones closest to each other are only providing diagonal support to an adjacent girder. A vertical spiral will also need to be installed on these columns and then a box girder will be needed for each section, so 5 box girders will be needed to bridge the gap.
In terms of the total box girders required to complete the project, I believe there is a box girder for each column. Since there are 36 columns, there will be 36 box girders*. Right now, we have 8 of the 36 in place (even though one box girder is not fully in place), so we are about 22.22% of the way complete.
I think in a best case scenario, based on what I have seen to date, we might be able to do one box girder every other weekday. If we worked both big cranes simultaneously at this rate, it would take 14 work days to complete the crown truss. That would take us to February 7th.
This assumes no more lost days due to weather, no more delays due to steel not being available, and no major lost time due to inspection delays. Realistically, I think we are looking in completing it in mid to late February. I will say February 22nd. Hope I am being too pessimistic on this...
*=I believe each corner starts with a single spiral holding a single very short girder that acts as a starting point for the corner. For simplicity, I will not count these.